Day 4 – Longwood Forest Slog

Today was rough as!

I woke up late, again wanting to give my ankle tendons as much time to heal as possible. I got going around 11.

I decided to take a short cut which meant cutting across some random farmland. Hopefully I don’t get in trouble (or shot at by some hyperterritorial farmer), hah!

That involved hopping over a couple fences, but I was lucky that 3/4 of them had unlocked gates. Finally, I made it up to the top of the hill and through the last gate. This shortcut (which my friend back in Invercargill mentioned) cut off about 5km of road walking and muddy trail. I thought I might get to my destination (Martin’s Hut) early, but oh how wrong I was!

Up to now, I had enjoyed the sunshine and a beautiful day. But about an hour into the trail (which now followed an old water canal “raceway”, dug by hand to aid in the gold mining efforts back in the day) the weather turned for the worse. A cold front brought on a ceaseless rain, which made the already muddy raceway trail even more difficult to traverse. And there were about a hundred different creeks, streams, and mud pits to cross on the way to the hut. Sometimes the trail would run right into a cliff or a downed tree, and you’d just have to figure out a way around it. It was nice that the trail stayed mostly level the whole time.

However, clearly no one had cleared the trail this season, as the brush was seriously overgrowing the path, especially the ferns! This fact, paired with the rain, meant that I was in for a thorough soaking, and a muddy slog, which would take me about 6 hours to get through. I thought it would take half that time, but nope!

I barely made it to the hut by dark, and I’ve never been so happy to have a roof over my head, curled up in a nice warm sleeping bag. I didn’t even get up to cook dinner, and made due with some cookies and granola bars until morning. Also, my head hurt from dehydration, because I couldn’t stop all day to drink water because of the constant freezing rain. My hands basically stopped working around 4pm due to the cold wetness.

But I’m writing this now sitting in front of a lovely fire I made at the hut. Thankful somebody collected all this starter kindling to make it easy to get a nice warm firehearth going.

Okay, I’m gonna spend a couple days here to let my ankles heal and wait out the worst of the rain. Goodnight!